BOOKS OF THE TIMES
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A High-End Top 30 List: Myths About Nietzsche
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: February 17, 2000
WHAT NIETZSCHE REALLY SAID
By Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins
263 pages. Schocken Books. $23.
By now many readers have at least an inkling of how much misunderstanding has surrounded the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who has been blamed for everything from killing God to advocating nihilism to inspiring Nazism with his promotion of the Ubermensch and ''the will to power.''
Such misunderstanding has greatly receded, for after all, as Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins point out in ''What Nietzsche Really Said'': ''Nietzsche has had enormous influence on the 20th century, and he seems to be starting out as the premier philosopher of the 21st.'' He ''is now the most often cited philosopher in the Western tradition. His name gets dropped in novels and movies, from Herman Hesse's 'Steppenwolf' and Milan Kundera's 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being,' to 'Blazing Saddles' and 'A Fish Called Wanda.' ''
Still, further clarification of Nietzsche's ideas can never hurt, and the authors do a useful, even amusing job of it in this latest entry in Schocken's What They Really Said Series, which so far has covered Freud, Jung and Darwin. Mr. Solomon and Ms. Higgins, both professors of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, employ a number of gimmicks, like lists of Nietzsche's virtues and digests of his books, to summarize his ideas, yet they also manage to convey the spirit of his elusive philosophy sensitively.
The trouble, the authors suggest, is that Nietzsche's writing contains no systematic account of what he thought. His books were often disjointed, self-contradictory, obscurely aphoristic and intentionally difficult. His life appears to have been unhappy, full of pain and suffering and ending in madness in his final decade. Then there was his sister, Elisabeth, a proto-Nazi married to a notorious anti-Semite. Their fascist legacy became attached to Nietzsche's name in the mind of posterity.
To clear this overgrowth, Mr. Solomon and Ms. Higgins begin with a section of 30 rumors about Nietzsche that they say should be forgotten. These range from ''Nietzsche hated Jews'' (not only didn't he, but he also eventually turned against Wagner because of the composer's anti-Semitism) to ''Nietzsche had no sex life'' (the authors give credit to a theory that he may have been gay) to ''Nietzsche sees the Ubermensch as an evolutionary goal'' (on the contrary, he saw it more as the ideal aim of spiritual development than as a biological objective).
Following a chapter on Nietzsche's books in which the authors stress, among other points, how Nietzsche's extreme irony can often be misleading, they offer ''Nietzsche ad Hominem (Nietzsche's Top 10),'' in which they list both the philosopher's favorite and unfavorite writers, some of whom, like Socrates, Wagner, Kant and Schopenhauer, appear on both lists, as Nietzsche's best and worst.
Such playfulness is not only witty and entertaining, it also allows the authors to approach the same points from several directions, shading in the varying nuances that Nietzsche brought to his crucial ideas in different contexts.
Yet interspersed with these faintly gimmicky sections are chapters that try to reach deeper into Nietzsche's thinking and stress the positive aspects of his most famous attacks. Two of these take up his wars against Christianity and morality, emphasizing that he tore them down only in the hope of replacing them with something better.
What was that to be? In answering this question, the authors engage Nietzsche's most elusive ideas, his exhortation that individuals strive to become more themselves (Be all that they can be, in the words of the United States Army's advertising slogan), by learning to love their fates (''Amor fati'') and embracing what he called ''eternal recurrence.''
This last, most difficult-to-define idea the authors see not as ''a theory about the basic structure of time, but a psychological test'' in which you ask yourself how you feel about repeating your life. They continue: ''Relishing one's life, with all of its pains as well as its pleasures, is the affirmation of life. Resentment, regret and remorse, by contrast, suggest an unwillingness to live one's life again, exactly as it has been.'' They conclude, ''Life is suffering, Nietzsche asserts (with Schopenhauer), but the proper response to this is not resentment or disengagement (as Schopenhauer proposed), but instead wholehearted 'Dionysian' acceptance.''
Of Nietzsche's love of fate, the authors write, ''It is a judicious outlook for a writer wracked with infirmity, wholly ignored by the public, to dream of a generation of future readers, 'philosophers of the future,' who would appreciate him.''
This book is simply further evidence that Nietzsche's dream has come true. Mr. Solomon and Ms. Higgins not only appreciate him; they also help us share their understanding.
ON THE WEB
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Photo: Friedrich Nietzsche